Some software teams get stuck because their business users don’t realise they need to make time to take delivery of features they’ve requested. Over time their UAT backlog increases to the point where the team’s throughput virtually stalls. Once upon a time there was a restaurant. It ...

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I wholeheartly agree that Craftsmanship shouldn’t lead to a bunch of prima-donnas but truth be told I don’t think that it will. Prima-donnas will always be prima-donnas at the end of the day. My own experiences are that of working for one of the UK’s most recognisable dot coms. A smal...

People come up with ideas for the product all the time. Users, operators, administrators, developers, testers, anyone. You want a mechanism for capturing that that’s different from the backlog, otherwise people dump all their half-baked ideas into the backlog, which makes lead time me...

But back to our login story. Every domain we include in a scenario potentially pulls in an additional stakeholder, whose requirements or priorities might change at any time. So to avoid a scenario becoming brittle we want to involve the minimum number of stakeholders we can get away w...

If we assume the only difference is that the second time round you have learned about the problem, this would suggest that the biggest impediment to your throughput was what you didn’t know . That’s not to say you spent all the extra time busily learning stuff. Heck that’s fun and wha...

Hi David, thanks for taking the time to comment. Fun and meaning and security all sound like things you value, and I definitely try to align my working practices and environment with my values because otherwise I end up conflicted, which saps my energy and makes me less effective. How...

First of all I’d like to say that I’m a big fan of the work you’ve done. I think vocabularies and phraseologies that are identified with BDD are quite valuable. I think the BDD tools such as JBehave, Cucumber, and FitNesse have done a lot to help with communications between programmer...

Estimates are always estimates. They are almost like the published schedule of a busy urban transit system; the time is given for arrival and departure of all trains and buses at the start of the year (or season) however the trains and buses can run late (compared to the scheduled tim...